Whether you love or loathe technology, it’s an inescapable fact that educators are making ever-greater use of it. Coursework gets submitted electronically, courses have their own virtual learning environments, books and journals are downloaded as pdfs rather than consulted in the library, and some courses are even now run entirely online.

But while technology is being built into courses, students seem oddly wedded to traditional pen-and-paper methods. Attend an undergraduate lecture and you’ll see the majority of students scribbling away; head into the library and you’ll see them keenly studying handwritten notes.

While this is understandable–pen and paper is still the simplest way of getting words down, with it not requiring a power source, an internet connection or much personal space to use–it means students are missing out on some of the great benefits that making use of technology for everyday uni tasks offers. This isn’t just a matter of technology having the potential to get you better grades–though this is in itself a pretty good motivator to ditch the notepad and go digital–but also to save you quite a lot of time.

Let’s have a look at a couple of essential pieces of technology for any undergraduate to see how they can help save time and push up marks.

Netbook

Having some form of portable computer with a keyboard is vital if you want your notes as computer files rather than sheets of paper. We suggest a netbook specifically because they tend to take up less space, have better battery life and are cheaper than standard laptops.

Many people don’t do their lecture and reading notes on a computer because they think that the only benefit of them is that it is neater than handwriting. But this isn’t the case. The real advantage of computer-written notes comes when you’re trying to prepare coursework or exams, and need to search through the entirety of your notes for specific bits of information. If your notes are handwritten, you’ve got no choice but to read them all. But if they’re pdfs or Word files all you need to do is search your computer for documents containing words or phrases that you know will appear in your notes in relation to the subject you need information on. You’ll find them instantly. And with the simple magic of cut and paste you can synthesize your longer notes into briefer documents in a couple of clicks.

Some people prefer to take notes by hand in a lecture before typing them up at home. That’s fine, so long as you’re happy with the extra hours it’ll take you every week to do this, and also are aware that the majority of people who grew up with computers can type much faster than they can write by hand, meaning your notes can be more detailed if you make them straight onto a computer.

Tablet

A tablet might seem a bit of an extravagance, but they do offer some genuine benefits over just having a laptop. Firstly, as any undergraduate student will tell you a lot of uni work is based around reading articles from online journals. Printing every article isn’t just a waste of your resources, but is also less useful for when you need to consult specific parts of them later, again because you can’t search a piece of paper for a keyword. And while you can read your articles on a laptop or desktop computer the fact is that reading from a tablet is a much easier thing to do for long periods, meaning you’ll be able to get more study done.

Another benefit of a tablet is the sound recording apps they offer. Being able to record your seminars and lectures is a good way to be able to go back and review bits of the course that you didn’t understand the first time round; what a lecturer said that didn’t make sense in week one–which made you not be able to take notes on it satisfactorily–might seem a lot more insightful and comprehensible when you revisit it at the end of the course.

Printer/Scanner

A printer is really just a way of bridging the gap between the digital and hard-copy worlds, but as a piece of technology it’s a must for an undergraduate that will safe you an enormous amount of time. This isn’t because it makes you work more efficiently, but rather because rather than opting to invest as little as £30 in a new printer, the vast majority of students still show up at uni without one, and then proceed to spend long and frustrating hours queuing to access ones on campus, and even sometimes missing coursework deadlines as a result.

And since all-in-one printer and scanners are about the same price as standalone printers it’s worth going for one of these models, not least because it’ll save you hours spent waiting in the even longer on-campus queue for the photocopier!